Archangel

Finally done! Most of these pictures are terrible unfortunately. The Archangel is simply bigger than anything else I've painted and my normal photo set up just isn't even close to capable of handling it. The whole project really stretched my normal processes to their limits and I had to do a lot of adapting. I'm going to use this post as sort of a cathartic release and just dump all my thoughts. For those of you uninterested in all that self indulgent blabbering, I've includes extra pictures!

Time: I started this project at the beginning of April, and it took me 2 months to get to an assembled and primed state. Then there was a big break on June 7th and I started painting it. My wife and son left for vacation visiting family and I was left by myself. What would have taken me at least a month if not more of evening painting sessions got done relatively fast, thanks in large part to a couple of full days of painting. I'd conservatively estimate probably 20+ hours of actual painting time. Without those couple full days of paint binging, I'd have really faced mental challenges working this project.

Holding: Normally I like to fully assemble a model except for putting it on its base and paint it that way. In this case having the wings separate made a really big difference since the wings make it really awkward to shift around. Painting in these 3 parts was, in retrospect, a good plan. I actually waited until it was fully painted to attach them. I had even done the bulk of the basing work before attaching them. I was able to just mount the main body on my normal spray cans and hold it that way pretty easily. I just wish I could have mounted the wings on cans as well, but that didn't work so well.

Color Mixing: There's a lot of surface. I mean seriously, a LOT. A very real problem was paint drying in the paint well before I could finish doing all the painting with it. The was particularly true with the skin which I did after the wing flesh and chitin. This made it really fidgety to work through. To overcome that, I tried to stick predominantly with pre-mixed paints. That kept the consistency throughout the painting process. Although this isn't the way I normally work, it worked well for this project. I would have loved to have done much more color mixing, but working with only the pre-mixed colors forced me to really push my 2BB skills further and that was a nice side benefit.

Painting Techniques: As I mentioned, I had to do a lot of aggressive 2BB work on this model and for the most part that worked out well. I also use a lot of controlled washes and using the larger-well palettes made that work pretty easy as long as I mixed enough paint. Layered washes has been a cornerstone of doing materials like chitin and stone for me for some time. The airbrush was also king for painting the wing flesh. All things considered, my normal techniques worked pretty well when scaled up.

Storage: Uhm, yeah, it's huge. I had to re-arrange my display case to accommodate it. And as for transport to events, I still have no clue. I magnetized it so I'm just planning to stick it to the top of my toolbox. Hopefully that doesn't end in disaster.

So anyway, overall I loved this project. I really do wish that I had the patience to spend far more time on it since it's a beautiful model. If I were to do it again and I was going to spend lots more time on it, I'd probably approach the whole project differently. It's FA:2 anyway, so I could legitimately field a second, but those odds are low.

And it's late, so I'm done. Time for sleep. If anyone wants close-up shots of parts of the model, just leave a comment and I'll snap more pictures.